Vancouver Canucks hockey is officially back!

Training camp from the South Okanagan Events Centre has officially come to a close, and we now turn our attention to NHL preseason action. The Canucks’ preseason kicks off this evening in Seattle when they take on the Kraken at 5 PM PT. The game will be streamed on canucks.com, and you can read our pregame piece by clicking here!

Here is the playing roster:

Here are three players we’ll be keeping a close eye on tonight.

The Seattle Thunderbirds captain and the Canucks’ 15th overall pick from the 2025 NHL Entry Draft, Braeden Cootes is no stranger to playing hockey on the west coast. He’ll get an opportunity to do that among NHL players while wearing a Canucks uniform for the first time tonight in Seattle.

Now, excitement for Cootes’s first preseason game would be high no matter what thanks to his status of a first round pick. But thanks to the strong showing he turned in through training camp — plus the fact that he looked right at home on a line with Kiefer Sherwood and Arshdeep Bains during the Canucks’ scrimmage on Saturday — excitement is very high for Cootes. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that he’ll go back to junior this season, but that’s not really the point.

Canucks fans are getting their first chance to see how far away their new top prospect is from being an NHL contributor, and they can’t be upset by what they’ve seen so far. Now, a bad preseason can of course put a serious damper on that excitement, but that’s part of why Cootes finds himself on this list. Good or bad, it will be very interesting to see how Cootes does against a Seattle lineup that has a good number of NHL regulars skating in it tonight.

Filip Chytil — another training camp standout — is eager to prove he can stay healthy and be an impact contributor for the Canucks as this team’s regular second-line centre. Although he skated with Evander Kane and Jonathan Lekkerimäki through camp, it looks like he’ll skate on a line with Nils Höglander and Lekkerimäki tonight.

Can Chytil help drive offence for that line? Can they win their matchups? A good trait of a second-line centre is adaptability, so throwing a new linemate at Chytil presents an interesting challenge for the 26-year-old. One thing I and some of the other hockey nerds will be watching closely when it comes to Chytil: How does he enter the zone? Adam Foote talked about his coaching staff working through film with Chytil to go over how he can better protect himself, and Chytil himself talked about how he felt a bit bogged down by Rick Tocchet’s systems that didn’t exactly encourage the type of controlled zone entries Chytil pulled off during his first few games as a Canuck.

If you disagree with this one because you’d put Tom Willander or Victor Mancini’s name here — not to mention Sawyer Mynio — I won’t argue with you. The Canucks have a young defence corps tonight, and it will be a good measuring stick to see how they perform tonight.

Elias Pettersson will be the one I watch the closest, because realistically, he’s likely going to be deployed on the Canucks’ top pairing tonight. He’ll be among the biggest minute munchers and will be relied on heavily in all situations. The last time DPetey was in Seattle was for the prospects showcase, where he stood out. He skated for most of camp on a pairing with Parker Alcos, but tonight, he’ll be playing with an NHL partner.

This is a great chance for Pettersson to remind everyone once again why he was able to find success at the NHL level last season.